Commented by: Volker Rehn (vr2_s18)

Martin Köditz, member of the German Firebird-docs team and hoster of the German Firebird forum, has been working on a php7 update of the native php-Firebird driver since January 2019 and released a first test version just yesterday, in the German Firebird forum.

We are currently testing the new driver. Apparently Martin hasn't informed the php folks that he is the new maintainer. I have asked him to let them know before this derails further. As soon as we are happy with the new version I'm sure it can be made available to a wider audience on the Firebird web site.

Have you seen this: http://firebirdsql.org/en/news/revival-of-php-driver-development/ ? Anyone who needs this driver - make it possible. Funding, testing, spreading the word, whatever.

Regards, Volker

Commented by: christophe derenne (cdr60530)

Thanks a lot to let us know that a team is working on this.
My heart feel better

Commented by: Lester Caine (lsces)

The idea of a new version of the PHP driver is good news. It seems unlikely that we can stop the PHP developers retiring the interbase one to PECL but on the other hand it may be the kick that is needed.
There are a number of faults being reported in relation to the existing one, and Nikita Popov has kindly sorted the only one that I see on current buils. The main complaints are about Thread Safety but I'm not sure that is really the problem, and the latest RFC update claims many field types just crash, which I'm sure will be news to actual users.
There are currently 6 open bugs and one of them is simply a complaint that the fbird_* aliases are not documented :) Two I can recreate and a third I will check over tomorrow. Leaving a 'fork' problem from 2009 which I think is totally to be expected since I don't see how you can use a connection created in one thread and simply carry on using it in another at the same time?
The final bug has a patch but is the area I was asking about earlier.

What is probably more important is to get on top of PDO_firebird which is not being retired and so will be the default way of accessing Firebird in PHP8 ... In my book it hamstrings too much and has never been completed, but it also has a few outstanding bugs which need addressing.

Commented by: Lester Caine (lsces)

Worth adding that ibase has been disabled in snapshot PHP builds on master
php/web-rmtools#7

Commented by: Sean Leyne (seanleyne)

Modified the subject to better reflect the issue.

Commented by: christophe derenne (cdr60530)

So what's goiing on now ?
Do we have to rewrite all our developments with pdo-firebird ?
I'd like to be wrong

php-interbase uses a procedural syntax and pdo-firebird, a syntax in object, the work of migration will be pharaonic.

The risk is that developers under php abandon firebird while it is very sincerely one of the best free database engine (for current use) that exists if not the best.

Commented by: @MartinKoeditz

No, I don't think we have to rewrite our codes to PDO syntax. We will keep a native driver.

There are two options:
1. We keep the "ibase" extension as it is and go on
2. We fork the "ibase" extension as an own PHP module and rename the functions from "ibase_<xyz>" to "firebird_<xyz>". So a simple search and replace would be enough.

I personally prefer option 2.